C3DL

Last April when I was at the Boston DevDay, my goal was to get lots of ideas from Mozilla devs on how to build on top of Vlad's canvas3d stuff--I still love this demo. Since then a lot has happened, not the least of which being the fact that Seneca got the Canadian government to agree that the web needs open and accessible 3D, and fund a two year research project in collaboration with Mozilla.

I'm pleased to announce that the project has now begun, and my colleague Cathy Leung is leading it. Cathy and her team are working to build a set of JS APIs on top of canvas3d in order to enable web developers to use 3D using the same tools and techniques they use for the current 2D web.

The project web page and blogs are at up now at www.c3dl.org, where you can also grab the project's first release. It's pretty cool to think where this will lead, when you can already do quite a bit with just 30 lines of JS (I need a video, this isn't enough):

As the project continues to build momentum, I hope you'll get involved and try the code, submit patches, and give these guys lots of feedback.

Cathy is at GDC this week, and if you're also in town, you should connect with her. She'll be the one with the tattoo on her arm that says, "My web includes all three dimensions" and a browser full of spinning cubes.